Article Directory Drop The RazorWe’re simply changing the way article directories are managed. We are creating a strong, integrity-based community of respected and successful article…

In the fifties the mass media referred to it as “wife-swapping.” Today it’s called “swinging,” but anyway of its name this sexual behavior seems to be increasing in recognition among typical, grown-up married couples in USA. The popular media are paying increasing interest to the fact, often putting a encouraging spin on the effects which the lifestyle has upon marriages. The North American Swing Club Association (NASCA) claims there are organized swing clubs in about all states as well as Switzerland, England, Germany, and Japan. These clubs are productive businesses which provide all levels of group activities for swingers including vacation plans, special retreat sites for swingers, and yearly gatherings and seminars. Lifestyles, Inc., a swingers voyage bureau, booked 700 couples at a resort in Jamaica in January of 1998.
What exactly is swinging? Dissimilar “open marriages” of the 1970’s which promoted non-possessive love and tolerance of betrayal in their spouses, or “polyamory” - the love of several sex partners at once – swinging is non-monogamous sexual action, treated a lot like any other social activity, that can be practiced as a pair. Emotional monogamy, or commitment to the love relationship with one’s marital partner, remains the major focus. Wife swapping is usually done in the company of one’s spouse and requires the approval of both to the practice. Although swingers often become close friends with other swinging couples, there are policy restricting emotional involvement with non-spousal partners. While swinging involves having sex with people other than one’s spouse, its followers claim that it enhances the relationship of the swinging couple both sexually and emotionally. By removing the privacy and dishonesty inherent in one’s natural desires for sexual diversity, the couple can explore their fantasies together without deceit or guilt. By removing the necessity for deceit from the sexual life, a new level of reliance and openness about all of one’s feelings is supposedly achieved without the negative baggage of jealousy.
Swinging as an alternative lifestyle is of both practical and scholarly importance because the challenge to combine sexual non-monogamy with emotional monogamy is deeply “abnormal” from the western model of romantic love which assumes that sexual and emotional monogamy are mutually reinforcing and inseparable. It has yet to be demonstrated empirically whether this alternative lifestyle in fact strengthens or weakens marital bonds, but in an era where 37% of husbands and 30% of wives, sometimes so-called milfs admit to having had at least one extra-marital affair, where divorce rates for first marriages are approaching 60%, and where family insecurity and parental neglect of children has become a main national worry, any attempt to redefine “love” and strengthen the marital relationship is worthy of our interest. If swingers have found a way to stabilize relationships, extend family ties, and enrich the lives of couples we would be remiss if we did not take their lifestyle and their redefinition of monogamous love seriously.
It is concluded that swingers surveyed are the white, middle-class, middle-aged, church-going section of the population reported in earlier studies, but when it comes to attitudes about sex and marriage they are less racist, less sexist, and less heterosexist than the general population. Swinging appears to make the vast majority of swingers’ marriages happier, and swingers rate the happiness of their marriages and life satisfaction in general as higher than the non-swinging population.